Curriculum Vitae
4 Minutes Read Time
(“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats)
a. First course, salad: Breast, Butterfly, Being.
Dessert, tautology explosion where Energy equals Lightspeed²
x a body. (See physicist toe asphalt in megaton shoes
asking if blast photo equals cold pastoral.) Language school.
b. If Truth is the egg, is Beauty a chicken? Being mostly speechless,
the Urn doesn’t ask how taut must be the line, in other words,
if a poem self-assembles or spells.
c. If we say the Urn is a Mother, it’s because “that is all / ye know on earth
and all ye need to know.” Listen to me, she cries—
d. You demonstrate the “alpine butterfly knot,” which can be used
to bypass a flaw in rope logic. Not to tie it,
but to admire how danger disappears inside it.
e. Which maybe explains how an elastic—is it illogic (listen to me)—
momentarily suspends the argument against Beauty
being Truth, babe.
f. When he was fourteen, John Keats nursed his mother in
consumption’s final Throes. Later, he will do the same
for his younger brother Tom. Tuberculosis is a mother
whose Throes equal Death equals Why equals
g. ∞, leading ultimately, Beth says, to the Big Bang where
Why was hatched in a gorge of particles.
h. Speaking of origin stories, Stendhal called Beauty
“the promise of happiness.” Say, instead of a time card,
you’re handed several double-terminated quartz crystals,
to be precise, Herkimer diamonds. In other words,
a transparent feeling
i. is surely a labyrinthine path to a clearing where two coyotes
are hunting prairie dogs hiding in holes.
j. Desire is said to equal Suffering but only when considering
endpoints & not the joy under the curve when
gamboling in sunlight & eating apples with your beloved.
k. To repeat, however, termini will knock when crying like a seeded cloud
all through the podcast on grief.
l. In 1820, Keats will be buried with Fanny Brawne’s unopened letters
on his breast. Coincidentally, Shelley will drown a year later
with a copy of Keats’s Lamia in his coat.
m. What is the world is not an improper question but appears to beg
a matrix of equal signs = = = = = & far too many commas , , , , ,
n. & all one can do when Ricardo, my brother-in-law, too young,
dies is draw an ℜ in a heart shape & attach a ribbon as if
image is adequate service. It is not.
o. Still, because you can’t really draw, you photograph buxom fuchsia
roses (the bud’s afterthought) at their blowsy drunken peak
p. or you view a real-time webcam of Ben Nevis, the collapsed dome of a volcano,
which Keats climbed in 1818 explicitly searching for the sublime,
a rope bridge across a void.
q. Listen to me, you tell the Urn, as if you could match its everlastingness
with word power, quarrelsome maidens, forest branches, trodden weed.
No.
r. Never,
s. the sound of it,
t. floating in water, circles you/us/whomever
with coming & going lapses. A coyote sings (to your neck hair).
Like bosons of knowledge blinking on & off, lights in the trees
tremble. Here is resting on the mountaintop, here
the rover lands on tranquility, gold in a unicorn tapestry.
u. So call the ode a site of surrender, then, like driving on a dark night
(as if all nights aren’t dark) to Santa Fe, hills atwinkle, bedeviled
by an urgent question (insert yours here) until figuratively
throwing up your hands saying I give up, up, up, finally—
take this burning & make what you will.
v. A bonfire, an ember, a sunrise. Therefore, & vastly,
the ode achieves a foundational peace, surpassing.
Not that we hold it, it holds us, a Mother’s job is comfort, hush.
w. What else is there besides walking the citadel emptied of self,
physics chalk on hands, momentarily schooled by, if not surrender,
art. Swallow the pill, sweetheart, so as to breathe above
floodwater, storm-gorged. Offer it up, Mom says—
x. normally, no instruction for one whose resistance does not wax
Yes. For today, Urn, I’ll fill you with stalky yellow Maximillian sunflowers.
y. At some point a wasp will nest inside you,
z. as Zephyr, a breeze, passes over—
Read more from Issue 22.1.
